Mobai joins Norway’s new digital fraud research center

Facial biometrics company Mobai will be the main biometric technology partner in a new research center focused on combating fraud in the financial sector at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Gjøvik. The 50 million Norwegian kroner (US$5.2 million) initiative aims to tackle threats such as deepfakes and social engineering.

The Secure Anti-Fraud Excellence Center (SAFE) was officially established earlier this week and will continue to operate for the next five years. Its long-term goal is to establish a permanent fraud center for the financial industry, according to NTNU.

The center is designed to bridge the gap between academic research and the financial industry and to strengthen Norway’s readiness to combat fraud in digital banking services. Fraud has become a significant issue in the Scandinavian country, with the Norwegian Financial Supervisory Authority reporting a record 1.2 billion Norwegian kroner ($126.1 million) in losses in 2024, double the figure for 2022.

“Fraud is today a significant social problem, and a great burden for the individuals affected,”  says Peggy Sandbekken, director of the Center for Cyber ​​and Information Security (CCIS) at NTNU.

SAFE will be led by Prof. Raghavendra Ramachandra, co-founder of Mobai and a professor at NTNU. The facial recognition developer is joining the project as a spin-off from the Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory at the university.

The project’s technical roadmap includes three areas: Researching facial biometrics for identity assurance, developing specialized algorithms and AI models to detect synthetic media and manipulated identities, and exploring how technical barriers and behavioral analysis can be combined to stop fraud before it reaches the transaction stage

Mobai will provide its biometric authentication and liveness detection technology to the project, the company explains.

The project’s funding comes from a group of investors, including NTNU, the financial foundation Sparebankstiftelsen Hedmark and Norway’s fourth-largest savings bank, SpareBank 1 Østlandet.

“What we at Sparebank1 Østlandet really like about this project is that the user and the person are in focus. This is not just a project for us, it is the way we do banking,” says Audhild Dahlstrøm, head of Community Funds at SpareBank 1 Østlandet.

Mobai has been working on strengthening face biometrics systems’ security for Norwegian banks since 2021.

The company recently received a grant from the Research Council of Norway last year to explore new methods for secure credential binding in digital wallets. The project focuses on user-controlled, shareable biometrics and also includes Partisia, an identity solutions company integrating multi-party computation (MPC).

Earlier in 2025, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority (NDPA) published a report exploring Mobai’s homomorphic encryption for protecting biometric templates.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  face biometrics  |  financial services  |  Mobai  |  Norway  |  research and development